December 2010

Merry Christmas to all of you who have been following this
blog all along in 2010. I thank each one of you for your comments,
your encouragement and your suggestions. Special thanks to
Stephanie and Clément who have been correcting the grammar in my
posts regularly. Special thanks to Jean Sébastien Lavoie for the great graphic identity.

Like this:

Many people work crazy hours to fill a void in their life. Some are just so driven and excited about what they do everyday that they cannot think of anything else.

In my case, I still don’t feel successful with work/life balance because I don’t work from 9 to 5. The lines are blurry.

So in 2011, I’ll stop trying.

From now on, I’m aiming for harmony instead of balance.

What does it mean? It means that I will try to enjoy every moment whatever I’m working on. Thomas Edison said that he never worked a day in his life… and yet, he was spending 18 hours a day in his labs. He was never successful with work / life balance because for him it was all play.

Those of us who will be shutting off over the next couple of weeks, make sure that you use that time well. Enjoy your time off from work while you are … away from the job.

Art is hard. Selling is hard. Writing is hard. Making a difference is hard. (SO TRUE)

When you’re doing hard work, getting rejected, failing, working it out–this is a dumb time to make a situational decision about whether it’s time for a nap or a day off or a coffee break.

Zig (ZIGLAR) taught me this twenty years ago. Make your schedule before you start. Don’t allow setbacks or blocks or anxiety to push you to say, “hey, maybe I should check my email for a while, or you know, I could use a nap.” If you do that, the lizard brain is quickly trained to use that escape hatch again and again.

Isaac Asimov wrote and published 400 (!) books using this technique.

The first five years of my solo business, when the struggle seemed neverending, I never missed a day, never took a nap. (I also committed to ending the day at a certain time and not working on the weekends. It cuts both ways.)

No matter what your job is, no matter where you work, there’s a way to create a project (on your own, on weekends if necessary), where the excitement is palpable, where something that might make a difference is right around the corner.

How many times do we blame others for what happens or what doesn’t happen to us?

When we point our finger at someone, did you ever notice that at least three of them are coming back towards us?

Confucius used to say; “Don’t complain about the snow on your neighbor’s roof when your own doorstep is unclean”

When you complain about something, 80% of people don’t care about your complaining and some of the last 20% are happy about your misery. Why? Because the first 80% are too preoccupied with their own lives. The remaining 20% are simply envious of you and that makes them secretly happy when something bad happens to you.

What was the question again? Oh yes, Who’s fault is it? Sorry folks, but it’s almost always your fault.

Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the positivepsychologyconcept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields.

According to Csikszentmihalyi, flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning. In flow the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. To be caught in the ennui of depression or the agitation of anxiety is to be barred from flow. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task.

Colloquial terms for this or similar mental states include: to be on the ball, in the zone, in the groove, or keeping your head in the game.

Sometimes we waste our time because we don’t have much control over what is happening to us. In this case, there’s not much we can do about it.

At other times we waste our time because we lack a definite purpose in our lives.
This we can do something about. We must take the time to ask ourselves the important questions, the ones that concern only us.

It may look like a waste of time at first, but in the long run, it will save us time.

Benjamin Franklin used to ask himself these important questions every night before he went to sleep.

What did I do wrong today?What did I do right ?What can I improve tomorrow?

Apparently, he did this for most of his life.

If you want to learn more about this, I recommend that you read his autobiography. It will make you realize that even if he lived more than 250 years ago, he was facing similar challenges like the ones we have to deal with today.